In order to decide if my new game Blake's 7 will support 3" disks, I need to know if most of the Oric 3" disk drives were single sided (you had to manually flip the disc to get to the other side, such as with Amstrad computers) or not (they had two heads).

I do have double-sided 3" floppy drives, but if I ever play on my real Oric, I'll probably use 3.5" disks.

I understand the (very interesting) question is about the existing hardware, but the results might have to be re-examined if you want to decide if it's worth doing a specific single-sided/double-sided version - or none

Hi Steve. My question, as Dbug clarified, is about how many 3" FDDs were double sided. I thought nearly no one, but I was obviously wrong!

So I might release the game in an image with a geometry of 40 tracks, so you can use both kind of disks... And now that I mention it, would that work for 5.25 floppies too?

I cannot split the game as you suggest, because of how the information is stored in the disk. There are no things as levels, but packs with strings, scripts, graphics, etc. which are loaded on demand. It is impossible to divide in two halves and very difficult even replicating things on both sides. And then the save point, which is stored at the end sectors and saved by the game itself when needed.